"Print books will eventually go away."

So says Adobe Systems CEO Bruce Chizen. It might be 5 years from now, or 10 or more, but print is dead.

You can always count on someone dropping that bomb during a digital publishing technologies conference.

While I mostly expected to hear a lot of that kind of stuff at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change Conference, I was surprised to hear something equally brash from Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson. During his keynote today, Chris said, “Free is the new business model of the 21st Century.” You can imagine how that went over with the print publishers in the audience. Heh.

It’s not all shock and awe in San Jose. There is a lot of topic exploration going on, and wrapping your brain around a new and very different business model is always entertaining. The general rule though is Web 2.0. It’s everything, and if you’re not eating, drinking and sleeping it, your still 1.0.